


A Minuscule Victory in The Endless War of a Thousand Little Things

by lurker_writes



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alucard is sort of there too, Gen, Hurt/Comfort Adjacent, Missing Scene, mid s2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27210055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurker_writes/pseuds/lurker_writes
Summary: Trevor Belmont oughtn't be trusted to take care of anyone or anything – but if the task falls to him, he's damn well going to try.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	A Minuscule Victory in The Endless War of a Thousand Little Things

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday gift for [@sadtheburrito](https://twitter.com/sadtheburrito). If you haven't yet seen their art, you are missing out.
> 
> Happy early birf, Sad! Here's to another one <3

Trevor jolted awake, the scent of woodsmoke and worse clinging to his tongue and the inside of his nose and choking him from within as his throat constricted down into tight uselessness. His back ached dully – and the knuckles of his right hand stung with a more urgent and acute sort of pain – but he couldn’t move because his arms were pinned and the firelight was jumping and flickering and—

And—

And nothing.

Nothing, because the fire was no more than the tiny sparks of magic dancing in all the lanterns of the Hold, and the smoke the extinguished candle in front of them, and the weight on his arms was the musty old sheet he’d tangled around the one, and the Speaker still asleep next to him, hugging the other to her chest with both of her own.

Which left… the vampire. Some part of Trevor – not even a small part, perhaps the largest part, the untrusting and ungenerous part that had kept him alive all those solitary years – wondered how he could be fool enough – exhausted enough – to actually sleep with a vampire in the room and—

But again, _and nothing_.

The vampire – _Alucard_ – had done nothing. Had barely even moved from the bookshelf he perched upon, reading up in the shadows where human eyes couldn’t penetrate the gloom. He was barely more than a flash of— of too-pale skin, and too-glossy hair, and too-bright eyes, and too-sharp teeth, too pretty, too polished, too _much_.

They locked eyes for a moment, in anything _but_ understanding.

And then Sypha was snuffling and mumbling as she pushed herself from his shoulder to blink up at him with sleep-bleary eyes.

Trevor glanced down at her, and that was all the time it took. He peered back up to the tops of the bookshelves just in time to see Alucard disappear, just a snap of coattails and a smear of red light, in only one beat of his—

Sypha pressed her hand, open-palmed, to the side of his ribs. “Trevor? Did something happen? Why is your heart racing so hard?”

He was struck by the idea that he was _too something_ , as well, something less flattering and more damning than a vampire prince.

“It’s nothing.” His throat – and his voice – was tight and dry and rough like he’d been swallowing sand. “Was just—” _a nightmare_ “—nothing. Go back to sleep.”

He reached over to tuck the musty fabric back around her, but she caught his hand and held it firmly, her own calluses catching against his. They were all along the sides of her fingers, he noted, where the leather of the cart reins rubbed against her skin.

“It isn’t nothing,” she insisted, low and mulish. “Look. Your hand is bleeding.”

Although his instinct was to brush it off again, to say something flippant about their _other_ companion, anything to draw away her attention, he did look. She wasn’t _wrong_. Two of his knuckles were turning a dull greyish-purple beneath the haze of hardened skin cultivated in many a tavern brawl, and the middle, which stood tallest, had cracked open and split. He would barely have called it bleeding, himself; just a few spattered droplets and a bit of ooze. He’d done worse to himself before on the particularly hard heads of the local toughs in whatever miserable little pisspot of a village he’d had the misfortune of staggering into when sobriety came a-calling.

“Did I… punch the floor?” he wondered, regrettably aloud.

“I am fairly certain that you punched the floor.”

Before that moment, Trevor might even have paid good drinking money for the pleasure of hearing Sypha agree with him on anything, solely because she was so stubbornly contrarian and he had enough of that out of himself, thanks. He revised his opinion. Sypha would only agree with him in the moments it might do his pride the most damage, and he’d rather she didn’t.

“Why would you do something like that?” she asked, like she’d never started awake trapped in the memory of—

Because of course she hadn’t.

Because that was not a burden most people – _good people_ – had to bear.

He pulled his fingers from her grip. It took some doing – she squeezed harder as he drew them away.

“Oh, you know,” he said, deliberately putting on his most flippant of drawls. “Must have been dreaming I was fluffing my featherbed. Floor had it coming. Shouldn’t have been so hard and gritty and—”

“And stone?” Sypha finished, regarding him with a raised brow. She cupped one hand beneath her other and called forth not the gleaming crystal ice he saw from her before, but a palm-full of snow, soft and fluffy like so much frozen down. “Give it,” she said, reaching for his hand again.

“That’s really not—” He pulled it back; clenched his fist and held it tight to his chest.

 _Damn_ but his knuckles stung. That floor might have been one of the hardest things he’d ever hit. If only his family had had the foresight to build the _rest_ of the old estate from more of the same, then maybe—

Sypha took her opening at the moment he weakened himself, and reached out with her quick, clever little hands to grab his and slap it, knuckles down, into her pile of snow.

He gasped and grunted – at the cold, only at the cold – and looked up to search across the top of the shelves for trouble to get himself into. A snide remark, a little spat, _any_ callous comment would be an easier chill to bear than one he had no context for or comfort with. But Trouble was not to be found.

“Bloody fucking vampire,” he grumbled to himself.

Sypha squeezed his sore knuckles. “Don’t be _rude_.”

He stared at her. _Don’t be rude_ , like she herself hadn’t been complaining of Alucard’s demeanor just before their little nap, as though the vampire wouldn’t _hear them_ , calling him an ‘icy well’ and all. And he sat there, snow melting against his knuckles, and wondered what the hell gave her the idea that Trevor Belmont was any different? Any _better_?

Had her life been so happy that she couldn’t realize their spoiled vampire messiah’s misery was just _fresh_? Whatever pit Alucard found himself in, life had only started digging that recently; whereas Trevor – Trevor was so deep down in the bowels of the earth that if Sypha thought she could reach him, it was only because she saw the shadow of his hand cast by the flames flickering at his back.

…But, he supposed, he _was_ still reaching, however uselessly, however grudgingly. Not for himself. Not because he thought it would be better. Just—

Sometimes, in the aimless, pointless wandering that was his life, he did something. Put a fledgling back in the nest. Fed a stray cat. Let a scruffy orphan pickpocket him without comment. The bird was probably eaten. The cat probably starved. The boy with the sunken eyes… Well. He knew what happened to pickpocketing orphans. He was one man, alone, and he didn’t have the power to fix a single damned thing.

But sometimes… sometimes, he could hold the tide back just a little bit.

The bird didn’t get eaten _then._

The cat didn’t starve _that day._

The boy would get to try again tomorrow.

The putrid, festering pisspot of a town that was Greșit… They lived _that_ night, didn’t they?

“Can I have more snow?” he muttered, as the last of it melted and dripped down between Sypha’s fingers.

The world was fucked and everything was terrible – but Sypha Belnades could go at least one more night without seeing how pointless it all was.

“I didn’t know you _could_ swallow enough of your pride to ask!” Sypha’s voice was triumphant – pleased, really – but quiet.

She made another palmful of soft powder to soothe his bruises with, and he pretended not to notice the way her slender fingers slipped beneath his thumb and curled around the side of his hand. He risked the slightest glance from their hands to her face. She looked… content. Happy, really, despite everything that was still happening up above their heads.

Well… good.

Trevor Belmont wasn’t a hero, and he was never going to be. There weren’t going to be any portraits of him standing proud in gleaming armor. That’s not what his life was. The best days he could hope for were just… this.

Just a minuscule victory in the endless war of a thousand little things.

“When we go back to sleep… you ought to let me hold your hand,” Sypha told him, nearly as shy as she was sly.

“Yeah?” Trevor asked, well aware that he should not. He didn’t dare look up from their cupped palms again. “And why’s that?”

“To keep you from fluffing any more stone floors, _obviously_. What are we to do if our vampire hunter can’t fight because he’s broken all his knuckles?”

“No, no. You’ve got it all backward. This is, uh… a training regimen.”

“Oh, really?”

He pulled his hand away and shook it out, flexing his fingers to work away the cold. “This floor might be the hardest thing I’ve ever hit,” he admitted with some chagrin. “If my knuckles can take this, Dracula’s face doesn’t stand a chance.”

Sypha’s mouth pulled at the corners in that way that meant she was trying not to laugh at him. “Is _that_ what you think?”

But there were still shadows under her eyes and a tired slump to her shoulders. He glanced up toward the top of the shelves again, searching for their other companion. Nowhere to be found – well if the vampire wasn’t here to say anything, he didn’t get an opinion on it.

Trevor offered his hand to her. “Best do your job, then. I think we can spare a few hours more.”

Maybe it was just the lingering chill from her conjured snow that made her fingers feel so warm. With her other hand, she tried and failed to stifle a yawn. “Maybe just… a little longer. So you don’t miss, right?”

He pulled the musty sheet a little tighter around her shoulders. “I’m telling you. I’m going to punch that murderous leech right in his pointy teeth. Won’t even know what hit him.”

Before he settled back himself, he spared one more glance out into the gloom. There – just a brief flash of a pale face and sad golden eyes, before Alucard ducked back behind another shelf.

 _Yeah_ , Trevor thought as he closed his eyes for, oh, just a few moments more. If life was so insistent on giving him what he didn’t deserve, surely it could spare a scrap of justice for someone who’d more than earned it. _Right in his pointy teeth._


End file.
